**SPOILERS** The film "Sea of Fear" is so handicapped by its cockamamie and overly complicated plot that it even fail as being an entertainingly bad film despite the many unintentional laughs in it.
There's this psycho killer on the loose on this chartered boat out at sea who's murdering the passengers and crew with impunity. The killer is so stealth and acrobatic that he's able to disappear, on a moments notice, into thin air without anybody knowing or getting the slightest glimpse of him until he just about murdered everyone on board! You know that the unseen killer has to be one of the seven people on board since he knows just what his victims fear most in the way they die! This information on his part was in them telling him their darkest secrets during an evening barn-fire and BS session on the deserted beaches of Snorkel Island earlier in the film.
It's when the ship's navigator Joel, Adam Mayfield, suddenly disappeared, possibly in the stomach of a Great White Shark, with the navigation equipment that things started to go down the drink with the passengers and the boat captain, Edward Albert, being terrorized and murdered by the shadowy killer.
The acting in the movie, with the exception of Edward Albert, is so lame and unemotional that those the psycho killer does in evoke absolutely no sympathy at all in just how easily they end up being killed off! It's as if that's exactly, in order to get out of the film, what they really wanted in the first place!
Besides the missing and left for dead Joel theirs Lance, Burgess Jenkins, who ends up being shark bait together with Derek, Christopher Showenman, who end up being deep sixth with the boat's anchor tied to his legs.
As everyone on board ends up dead we end up with only Ashley, Caroline Walker, and the Captain left alive and it becomes apparent to the movies audience that one of the two has to be the killer but which one!
***SPOILER ALERT*** It's then that things start to go haywire with the movie getting into high gear in trying to be some kind of super IQ, that only members of Mensa can figure out, whodunit with its slew of ridicules and unending twist endings. By the time you finally get it straight to who the killer is your brain had been so twisted out of shape that you don't even care any more.
If the film just stuck to the basics of you garden variety slasher film it may well have been worth watching. Instead it tried to be so cute and overbearing in it trying to fool or impress its audience that it fell apart long before it revealed who its killer really was. About the only thing interesting in the film, besides it sunning at sea photography, was the reason the killer did in his victims. That I have to say was about the only thing that shocked me in that it was far more of a surprise in what the killer's motives were then who the killer was himself!
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